Why am I not working?” Barbra had asked Sydney Pollack early in 1978. “What am I saving myself for? This is stupid. I should be out there. So every picture won’t be great. I just sit and wait and wait—for what? For Chekhov to come along? For Shakespeare?”

The French director François Truffaut had once told Barbra, “You do your work, and at the end [of your career] you have a body of work. Some of it is good and some of it is not good, but the stuff that’s good will override what isn’t good—that’s what a body of work is. You can’t just sit and wait for the perfect thing to come along.” Perhaps Truffaut’s words rang in Barbra’s ears as she chose a very imperfect vehicle for her return to the screen after two and a half years, a screenplay that was about as far from Shakespeare as it could get.

The Main Event began as an idea of Renee Missel, who became the executive producer of the film with her partner, Howard Rosenman. The story evolved into a script by Gail Parent and Andrew Smith entitled Knockout, about Hillary Kramer, the owner of a perfume company whose business manager absconds with all her money. The only asset she has left is Eddie “Kid Natural” Scanlon, a former boxer and now a driving instructor, whose contract Hillary’s business manager had purchased as a tax write-off. By threatening legal action against him, Hillary persuades a reluctant Scanlon to return to the ring and start making her some money. After several skirmishes, romantic as well as pugilistic, they fall in love. Barbra saw the property as a likely candidate for her and Jon to produce in order to fulfill her final commitment to First Artists.

“The Main Event was my fault,” Jon admitted. “I pushed her into that one. It was time to do a movie. I wanted her to do a comedy, and it was material that she really didn’t like. It was the last time I think Barbra will be pushed into anything.”

Barbra hoped the script could be fashioned into a contemporary version of the rollicking battle-of-the-sexes romantic comedies that had been a Hollywood staple since the silent era. She also felt the story’s premise could allow an exploration of a confusing contemporary issue that fascinated her: the changing societal roles of men and women. How, for instance, would the supermacho boxer react to a female boss?

Typically, she was full of ideas and wasn’t shy about passing them on to the screenwriters, who were glad for the input. “Barbra wasn’t just lounging around like some old-time movie star, saying, ‘Write something clever,’” said Gail Parent. “She was there with us, improvising and suggesting lines.”

Barbra had only one actor in mind to play “Kid” Scanlon. In an offer she made over the phone she told him, “Ryan, if you don’t want the part, I don’t want to make the picture.” Ryan O’Neal, a former amateur boxer, had had a string of disappointing films, had just lost the leads in two other boxing movies, Flesh and Blood and a remake of The Champ, and had fallen into such a funk that he was close to quitting the business.

Barbra wheedled and cajoled, begged and pleaded with him to come aboard. Finally he replied, “If you’re in it, I’ll do it.” No doubt his acquiescence was helped along by Barbra’s offer of a $1 million salary.

The showman in Jon Peters agreed that Ryan was the perfect co-star for The Main Event; audiences would likely be eager to see the What’s Up, Doc? co-stars together again. But he was wary of putting Barbra into such close proximity with one of her former lovers. Steve Jaffe was surprised when he heard that Jon had agreed to O’Neal’s casting. “There was a time,” Jaffe said, “when Jon didn’t want to hear Ryan’s name mentioned. It was very hard on me because at the time I represented both of them. I’d be in Jon’s office, and Ryan would call me and Jon would say, ‘You’re not taking that call here.’ In the maximum sense of machismo, right or wrong, Jon and Ryan were rivals. I could see them flexing. Barbra probably had the last laugh every day on The Main Event, because here were two guys who were in love with her, and in her shadow.”

According to Andrew Smith, Ryan enjoyed baiting Jon whenever he had a romantic scene with Barbra. “Ryan would always put a little extra something in the scene if he knew Jon was watching,” Smith said. “He’d tweak her ass or bite her earlobe. It drove Jon crazy. He stopped coming around when they did love scenes. He told Ryan that when the movie was over, he was going to get into the ring and beat the hell out of him.”

ONCE THE STAR packaging was completed in early 1978, final contract negotiations with the producers began. “At the meeting,” Howard Rosenman told the author Shaun Considine, “Jon Peters began to renege on the deal [that had been] set up through Sue Mengers. He and Barbra decided they would only give us half of what had been originally promised.” When Rosenman heard this, he told his agent to relay a message to Jon: “You tell Mr. Jon Peters to take his new deal and shove it up his ass.”

“I knew I owned the material,” Rosenman said. “I also knew that Jon had put a million and a half of his own money into the project, signing Ryan and other expenses. He got on the phone. ‘You self-destructive cocksucker!’ he began. ‘I’m offering you the chance of a lifetime. Your whole career is gonna be made with a Streisand credit. She made Ray Stark; she can do the same for you. You’re fucking insane; you belong in Camarillo [a California mental hospital].’ And I replied, very calmly, ‘Jon, when you can pronounce “Camarillo” I will have a conversation with you.... Now, here are the new terms I’m giving you and your greedy girlfriend.’ And I added another fifty thousand and another percentage point, and I said, ‘At the close of business today, if the check isn’t in my lawyer’s hands, then we will go to Diane Keaton, to Jill Clayburgh, and to Diana Ross, because I own this piece of material and you, Jon, have made it hot!’”

Jon swallowed hard and gave the man what he demanded, but Sue Mengers told Rosenman that he was to stay away from the set and do virtually nothing except show up for the premiere. “And when you see Barbra and she forgets your name, smile.”

DURING THE FILM’S preproduction phase, Barbra told the assistant director, Patrick Kehoe, that she might direct the picture. She later decided against it, Kehoe believed, because “she felt she couldn’t prepare as an actress and also as a director in the time that was available.” Still smarting from the debacle with Frank Pierson, Barbra wanted a director who would be willing to accept her as a full-time, hands-on, often pain-in-the-ass collaborator.

After he met with Barbra and Jon, the thirty-six-year-old director Howard Zieff, who had won attention for the quirky Hearts of the West in 1975 and House Calls in 1978, agreed to the terms and came aboard. One of the conditions of his contract forbade him to write or speak negatively of Barbra and Jon for the rest of his life.

Cast in supporting roles were Patti D’Arbanville as the Kid’s sleazy girlfriend, Whitman Mayo as his trainer, and James Gregory as a gruff fight manager. Howard Zieff suggested Allan Miller, Barbra’s former acting coach, to play Hillary’s ex-husband. But, Miller said, “I was kept out of the movie because of Barbra.”

It was only after he had read successfully for Zieff that Miller discovered this was a Streisand picture. “She’ll never let me in the movie,” he told Zieff.

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, I won’t tell you the whole story,” Miller replied, “but just by being there I would bring up memories of things she does not want to recall at this point in her life. She might still think of me as a teacher or director, judging her work.”

Zieff laughed off Miller’s prediction, but after broaching the idea to Barbra, he admitted to Miller that he had been right. “Oh, he’s a very good actor,” Barbra told Zieff, “but I can’t have him be my husband.” The dour-faced comic actor Paul Sand, who reminded some observers of Elliott Gould, won the role.

With a budget close to $7 million, The Main Event went into production for First Artists/Warner Brothers during the first week of October 1978. Barbra and Zieff agreed that the film’s energetic comedy would be enhanced by location filming, but boisterous onlookers at every site often made Zieff wish they were on a closed studio set. One brief scene between Barbra and Ryan, set at a sidewalk hot-dog stand on the busy corner of Beverly and La Cienega in West Hollywood, had to be halted when two young women in a passing car shrieked, “Oh, my God! It’s Barbra Streisand!!” Three hours later, after two fender benders at the intersection, the shoot was scrapped. “You realize what a big star she is,” Howard Zieff said, “when you go out for a hamburger with her. Fans mob her like they used to mob Valentino or Garbo, she’s that popular.”

NEVER FULLY SATISFIED with the finished script, Barbra took suggestions from anyone about how to improve a scene, and she encouraged improvisation. Richard Lawson played the Kid’s boxing nemesis, Hector Mantilla, with an amusing accent. For a scene in which Hillary, barely able to keep awake, challenges Mantilla to a winner-take-all match with Scanlon in the midst of a television interview hosted by the sportscaster Brent Musburger, Barbra, Ryan, and Lawson all winged it. “The lines were basically there,” said Lawson, “but the imitation Barbra did of my accent was improvisational. The scene took on a life of its own. It was written as a straight interview, but the whole aspect of her falling asleep and Ryan waking her up, and of her calling Musburger ‘Brett’ and ‘Burt’—all of that was total improvisation.”

Barbra’s desire to infuse The Main Event with some relevant points about the real-life battle of the sexes was most apparent in a scene she concocted and inserted into the film, against the advice of Zieff and others, after filming had wrapped. Finally giving in to their mutual attraction, Hillary and the Kid make love for the first time during their stay at a training camp. Barbra felt a “morning after” scene was necessary to further define the two characters and what this new physical relationship might bring. “I thought it would be [a chance] to see where these two people are coming from [and] how different they are emotionally. [A chance] to say something about men and women and the roles they’re supposed to play and yet be funny.” Although unsubtle, the scene allowed for some amusing role reversal as Scanlon expresses his concern that Hillary might not respect him now that she’s had her way with him.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER The Mam Event wrapped production early in 1979, Howard Zieff began to construct his director’s print, even though he knew the final cut would be Barbra’s. In the meantime, work began on the musical elements of the film. Producer Gary LeMel, who had helped steer Barbra’s Superman album to the top of the charts, asked longtime Streisand fan Paul Jabara (who had just won a Best Song Oscar for “Last Dance”) to compose a disco-style title number for The Main Event to capitalize on the most popular musical genre of the seventies. Written with Bruce Roberts, the song didn’t impress Barbra at first because the lyrics didn’t reflect the film’s boxing theme. Bob Esty, who had produced “Last Dance” for disco queen Donna Summer, suggested that the song be combined with “Fight,” a number he and Jabara had developed as a send-up of the camp disco group the Village People. Barbra liked the idea of a medley, but she was timid about venturing into dance-oriented pop for the first time since “Shake Me, Wake Me”—until twelve-year-old Jason responded strongly to the song. “He was the one who really sold it,” Esty recalled. “He loved it and [Barbra] listened to him.”

Warner Brothers opened The Mam Event in eleven hundred theaters across the country on June 22, 1979. The cornerstone of the promotional campaign was a sexy photograph of Barbra, braless in a tank top and tight satin shorts, and Ryan, bare-chested and in trunks, in a classic nose-to-nose boxing pose. Despite mostly negative reviews, Barbra’s popularity and the desire of many moviegoers to see if she and Ryan could re-create the magic of What’s Up, Doc? brought the film a glittering gross of $66 million, making it Barbra’s third most successful picture to that date, behind A Star Is Born and What’s Up, Doc?

A film replete with annoying inconsistencies, The Mam Event disappointed many Streisand admirers, who had expected Barbra’s follow-up to A Star Is Born to be something worth waiting almost three years for. She has her amusing moments, but her Hillary Kramer is a bafflingly schizophrenic character. As the head of “Le Nez” (The Nose) perfumes, she’s the picture of competence and business savvy. But in her private quarters, or when confronted with the alien world of professional boxing, she calls to mind Lucy Ricardo at her dizziest. Even as a fish out of water, she is largely an unbelievable character. O’Neal’s bumbling, boyish charm is more appealing, but he too is hampered by the silly, sometimes turgid script.

Despite its shortcomings, The Mam Event showed “legs” throughout the summer, in part because of the success of the exuberant title song, sung by Barbra, which shot up to number three on the singles chart.

SHORTLY AFTER THE movie’s release, several press accounts depicted Howard Zieff as a director who had suffered a meddlesome superstar. A profile in the Fort Lauderdale News, headlined “Wherein an Underrated Director Risks All to Tangle with ‘La Barbra,’” called Zieff “a Streisand survivor.”

The piece quoted Zieff, who chose his words carefully so as not to violate the clause in his contract that forbade him to speak ill of Barbra: “People look at you in amazement when you say you’ve just directed Streisand. They say, ‘He can handle movie stars and still bring movies in on time and around budget.’... Barbra always has final say on her movies.” In another interview he said, “She just took over the editing and cut the film to her own purpose... as producer, she had full control.”

Ryan O’Neal told Rex Reed, “In What’s Up, Doc? we did what we were told. Peter Bogdanovich ran the show. This time we tried all kinds of things. [Barbra] played the Bogdanovich role. Howard Zieff was under lots of pressures. I think he held up pretty well.”

Barbra avoided public discussion of her relationship with Zieff, but privately she admitted that the experience was only slightly less painful than her “collaboration” with Frank Pierson. She considered both men maddeningly unable to make up their minds. To her, “directing is a good job for someone who has opinions.”

What Barbra didn’t know was that she had been urged to hire Zieff as a practical joke. The producer Jennings Lang, in whose home Barbra had sung to raise funds for the Pentagon Papers Defense Fund, recalled that early in 1978 he had attended the farewell performance of Zubin Mehta as the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “Everybody who is anybody is there,” Lang related. “[Walter] Matthau is sitting with his wife, Carol, in one row; Barbra Streisand is with Sue Mengers in the row in front of them. [Walter and I] had just finished a picture called House Calls, and we had a lot of problems with Howard Zieff, our director, the man who can’t make up his mind. He’s a very talented guy, except he changes colors from black to white in ten seconds. He’s just not definitive about what he wants to do. He was driving everybody crazy, including Matthau, on the set.”

At intermission, Barbra and Sue Mengers stood up, and Sue noticed Walter Matthau. “Walter, you know Barbra,” she said. Matthau put his arms around Barbra, kissed her, and burbled to Mengers, “I’ve always been in love with her. I always loved her. I miss her so much.”

Barbra quickly cut to the chase. “Tell me about Howie Zieff.”

“He’s the greatest director in the world!” Matthau exclaimed. “You can’t use anybody else. He knows every shot he’s going to take a week before he’s on the set. You won’t have to think; he’s marvelous!”

“GET MY LAWYER on the phone!” Barbra screamed as she threw the magazine across the room. “I want this off the newsstands!” The offending publication, the November 1979 issue of the sleazy skin rag High Society, had blazoned across its cover, along with a photo of Barbra in her modeling outfit from The Owl and the Pussycat, not one but two banner headlines: “Barbra Streisand Nude.” The magazine’s editors had gotten ahold of several un-fogged frames of Barbra’s topless scene in that film and had published them to great fanfare.

Barbra sued for $5 million and demanded that the magazines be recalled. They never were. “We did agree to send out telegrams to our nearly five hundred wholesalers,” the editor Gloria Leonard said, “asking that, if they hadn’t already distributed the book to newsstands, they tear the pictures out and tape over the word ‘nude’ in connection with Streisand’s name on the cover.... Frankly, I know there will be some distributors who’ll just say, ‘The hell with the wire,’ and won’t go to the bother of following its instructions.”

The photos showed that Barbra had a very appealing bosom, and the issue quickly became a collector’s item. Barbra never won any damages from the magazine, but the nude frames, even though the fogging made it impossible to see much, were edited out when The Owl and the Pussycat was released on videocassette in 1980.

THE SUCCESS OF “The Main Event/Fight” led its composers, Paul Jabara and Bruce Roberts, to submit another song to Barbra after they received word that she was planning an album called Wet, built around a theme: all the songs had to relate in some way to water. Charles Koppelman, who had left Columbia to form the Entertainment Company and had acted as executive producer for Barbra’s recent albums, didn’t like “Enough Is Enough,” a new disco number Jabara and Roberts had come up with for the album, because the lyrics weren’t “wet.” Undeterred, the team turned it into a medley with another composition of theirs, “No More Tears.”

When Koppelman still seemed reluctant to suggest the song to Barbra, Jabara took matters into his own hands and approached Streisand directly. He wrangled an invitation to Malibu to pitch “Enough Is Enough/No More Tears.” He took along Donna Summer, with whom he hoped Barbra would agree to record the song as a duet. “That would be the ultimate,” Jabara said, “having the two divas meet and record together.” Through sheer chutzpah, Jabara managed to get Barbra, Donna, and Jason—a big Summer fan—into a small room at the ranch, and while Jon listened outside the door, Jabara “sang the song to them, performing both parts. Then I got on my knees and begged them to do it together, to try the song just once.”

Barbra agreed to record with Summer in part because of Jason’s enthusiasm for the idea. “My son likes Donna,” Barbra said. “He never plays my stuff.”

Streisand and Summer, Jabara said, “were like two high school girls, not like two great artists. When they were home alone rehearsing at the piano, they were wonderful. As soon as there were twenty people around, though, the vibes changed.”

Rumors of tension between the “dueling divas” were rife, but Donna Summer denied them all. “It was fun,” she said. “She’s a funny girl. There was a lot of comedy going back and forth between us.... We were holding the high note of ‘Enough Is Enough,’ and I didn’t breathe right. I just held the note too long and fell off my stool. Barbra kept holding her note, and then at the end of the note, she said, ‘Are you all right?’ It was hysterical, because by the time she asked me, I was coming to. I hit the floor and it jolted me. She didn’t stop holding her note. It was the height of professionalism. She thought I was playing around.”

Still, there couldn’t help but be a touch of competition between two superstars, and Jabara admitted that although Streisand and Summer recorded the song face to face, each woman came back into the studio separately to redo some notes. Barbra recognized Donna as the premier disco singer and turned to her for advice. Summer was stunned. “You’re Barbra Streisand!” she replied. “You’re asking me how to sing?” John Arrias, Barbra’s recording engineer, understood her discomfort. “She doesn’t [ordinarily] sing on the beat,” he said. “She sings after the downbeat. But for disco you have to be on top of the beat, and that’s what Donna was trying to impress upon her.”

“Enough Is Enough/No More Tears” was released in October from Columbia in a standard single format that ran four and a half minutes and from Donna’s Casablanca label in an eleven-and-a-half-minute dance-club re-mix in the twelve-inch format. Eagerly anticipated, the driving duet with its wailing vocals hit number one on the singles chart within weeks. Both versions of the song sold over a million copies and topped charts in England, Spain, and Australia.

The album Wet, released two weeks after “Enough Is Enough,” proved only partially successful. The exciting duet with Summer is surrounded by dreamy romantic ballads, while “Splish Splash” is delivered tongue-in-cheek with Barbra backed by members of the group Toto. Standout cuts include “Niagara” and “Kiss Me in the Rain,” two beautifully crafted and powerfully sung new ballads. But overall the water motif provided only a strained cohesion to the package.

Wet climbed to number seven on the album chart, and even critics who didn’t care for some of the material Streisand was singing had to admit that she was now a powerful force in pop music, a full decade after What About Today? had seemed to indicate that she would never be comfortable with contemporary material. Since 1971 Barbra had not had a studio album—as opposed to a sound-track or a live album—chart at less than number thirteen. Even more remarkably, after failing to sell singles during her meteoric rise to success in the sixties, she had had four number one singles in the seventies, the same number as Donna Summer and more than any other Columbia artist.

Nearly twenty years after her start in show business, Barbra Streisand had eclipsed all of her early contemporaries and continued at the peak of success even in the midst of the sea change in popular music represented by the disco craze. It was an unprecedented record of success and longevity. In the wake of “Enough Is Enough/No More Tears,” US magazine voted Streisand and Summer the top female vocalists of the seventies.

AT HOME AFTER she completed The Main Event, Barbra often found herself acting out real, debilitating battles—with Jon. They had always fought with abandon, and early in their relationship they had found the skirmishes emotionally and sexually arousing. “I don’t think we’ve ever stopped battling,” Barbra said. “And the more we fight, the closer together we seem to be. We’re not phony with each other. We don’t lie to each other, and that’s something that turns us both on.”

“We fight and war and battle,” Jon confirmed to Jerry Parker of Newsday. “Sometimes she’s totally crazy. But Barbra is a very gentle, understanding, giving human being who has helped me through a lot of difficult times.... Barbra is the first person I ever respected totally—on all levels. In some ways she’s almost like a man. She’s strong. She’s successful. She takes responsibility.”

Jon has said that living with Barbra became difficult because after her initial delight at being in the kitchen for him, she rarely capitulated to his male prerogatives. “She gives what she feels, as opposed to what’s demanded of her. For instance, if I say, ‘I’m tired, will you rub my head?’ she says, ‘Why don’t you rub my head? I’m tired, too.’”

One method they used to settle these disagreements, Jon said, was to compare notes about their youth. “We are always arguing about who had the worst life. The one who is the more convincing gets a head massage.”

But as the seventies drew to a close, the battles grew worse and placed a tremendous strain on their relationship. Usually after a particularly bad row, Jon told Rosalie Shann, “One of us—usually me—will say: ‘Let’s sit down and talk. Do we want to split? Don’t we want to be together any more?’ That’s the bottom line, the worst. We agree we do want to stick together.... So we sit down and talk.

“The worst fights by far are the quiet ones. Because then I feel sick, really physically sick. We’re not communicating and [we’re] angry about something, but what we’re angry about isn’t the real cause. It’s something deeper, and we’re not getting to it. Those times we go to our therapist and he helps us sort things out.”

The couple went to see “a truly wonderful psychiatrist” at least once a week at $100 an hour. “It really does help,” Jon said. “Our two sons go, too.” Jason had sessions with Dr. Stan Ziegler, a renowned expert in adolescent emotional problems.

The therapy couldn’t keep Barbra and Jon from the decision to break up. For Barbra, Jon’s unpredictable temper was bad enough; she loathed the times he made her fear him, just as she and her mother had feared Louis Kind. But there were also rumors that Jon was seeing other women, and that would have been enough to give Barbra serious second thoughts about staying with him.

What Jon had called “the bottom line, the worst” happened late in 1979—he and Barbra split. Jon moved back into a house he still owned in Encino, and after thirteen-year-old Jason’s bar mitzvah on January 5, which Jon did not attend, Barbra retreated to Manhattan and her Central Park West penthouse. Within a few days of her arrival the columnist Liz Smith reported that Barbra was in the midst of “a little away-from-California romance” with a man Smith couldn’t identify. “A male visitor with a handful of flowers went yesterday evening to her twenty-first floor apartment... and after more than three hours the superstar and Mr. X left together.”

“Mr. X” was Arnon Milchan, a forty-something Israeli millionaire who was about to embark on a career as a Hollywood producer that would lead to his producing Pretty Woman and JFK, among other hits. He escorted Barbra around Manhattan, took her to the theater nearly every night, and kept Liz Smith in a tizzy.

Barbra denied that Milchan was anything more than a friend, and it is likely that her conversations with the man concerned the financing of Yentl, a difficult project which she wanted to direct and for which she was having trouble raising money. In any event, Barbra’s rendezvous with Milchan ended before very long and resulted in neither romance nor financing.

The news of Barbra’s dates with Milchan frightened Jon. He harbored hope that he and Barbra might smooth out their problems, and the thought of her with another man made him face the awful possibility that he might lose Barbra forever. He pleaded with her to take him back, and finally she did. She loved him after all, in spite of their problems, and as Jon had said, on their good days they could still “fly over the universe.”

In 1976 Barbara Walters asked Barbra and Jon whether they could envision themselves growing old together. “Yes,” Jon replied quickly.

“No one else would have us,” Barbra added.